Health & Parenting

Tools & Resources

Keeping Kids Safe

What parents can teach.

WebMD Archive

Rethinking Some of the Old Rules continued...

Take the old notion of "stranger danger." It turns out that of all
children that are reported as kidnapped in the United States each year, fewer
than 100 of them were the victims of someone they didn't know at all, according
to Gavin de Becker, a leading expert on predicting violent behavior and the
author of the best-selling book "Protecting the Gift." Besides,
"stranger" isn't an easy concept for a young child to grasp. At what
point in a conversation does someone cease being a stranger? What about that
man in the grocery store line?

De Becker says that the real safety issue isn't strangers, but strangeness
-- inappropriate behavior and a child's vulnerability to the process of being
persuaded. Rather than concentrating on the distinction between stranger and
friend, says the new thinking, we should educate our children about common
lures and ploys; teach them to trust their own feelings when something isn't
quite right; and reassure them that it's OK to say no to adults -- including
those they may know well -- who do or say something that makes them feel
uncomfortable or scared (see Your Children Can Help Protect
Themselves).

Giving Kids the Skills They Need

A few years ago, some safety educators distinguished between "good
touching" and "bad touching." But this distinction has proved
largely ineffective. For one thing, it applies an objective standard to a
subjective experience -- too fine a line for most adults, let alone most
children. It fails, too, because it is a message absorbed only on an
intellectual level, says Chaiet. When presented with a real threat, it's common
to freeze up and not to be able to think or evaluate at all. When danger is
present, kids need to know how to act quickly and not ponder. "The
distinction between good touching and bad touching doesn't get kids to tell the
person to stop," says Chaiet, "and it doesn't get them out of
there."

That's why many of the programs widely used today focus on different kinds
of training -- active skills that children can use in emergencies, and skills
they are more likely to use because they have had some practice. Prepare and
Impact Personal Safety concentrates on what Chaiet calls
"adrenaline-based" training. The idea is to teach kids what to do by
letting them actually feel what it's like to be threatened and to fight
back.

In a typical class, a 7-year-old gets to practice talking back to and
warding off a padded attacker -- striking back, running away, and yelling. The
child role-plays "every level of boundary violation," from
inappropriate touch, lying, and bullying, all the way up to physical assault.
The process, says Chaiet, decreases a child's anxiety by increasing his or her
sense of self-reliance and providing the child with a plan of action. The
children are taught to use what gives them their power -- their voices and
movement.